Essex County Volume 1: Tales From the Farm p17

Date-stamped 26 Mar 2006

Jeff Lemire on his substack:
"I am often asked how autobiographical Essex County is. And really it is mostly fiction. Lester is definitely a surrogate for me, a kid lost in his comics and his imagination, longing for something else. But his circumstances in the story are total fiction. I wasn’t an orphan, I wasn’t an only child and I had two loving parents and never befriended a hulking ex-hockey star. But what was real was the drawings of locations from around Essex County and the farm I grew up on. And I would steal little personality traits from people I knew growing up and combine them into different characters. Like all fiction you work the truth in there, but not always in a one for one sort of way. It all gets mixed up and Filtered through the story in different ways."

"And with the First book, Tales From The Farm, I also embraced the weird “back of the pen” style I had been experimenting with at Sheridan. This basically means I was using the backs of steel-point dip pens to draw rather than the intended pen tip. This led to really odd lines that weren’t always predictable and added a really strange, angular quality to the drawings that I just loved. I also started drawing this book really big. The norm is to draw comic pages about 1 ½ times the size of printed comic. And that’s pretty much how I draw them now. But with Essex and this unpredictable pen and ink style, I needed a bigger canvas to really let loose and I drew all of Tales and Ghost Stories on huge paper about twenty by thirty inches."